Joshua Krall recently released a Ruby gem called Analytical (yes I know I say it wrong in the podcast) which it super simple to have multiple analytics engines and do event tracking from anywhere in your application while maintaining a clean html layouts. So far it supports Clicky, Google, and KISSMetrics, but it’s coded in a way which makes it real easy to add new analytics engines.

If you like the idea of hacking your voicemail, you may want to check out Tropo-Voicemail by Jonathan Rudenberg. Basically if you have a GSM phone with forwarding, you can forward your voicemail to Tropo which can then interface with Tropo-Voicemail. It records the message, transcribes it, and emails you the voicemail text, with an attached audio file.

Similar to chef, Babushka gives you a the ability to install and configure systems, but in a more test driven format. With Babushka you simply write “deps” or dependencies which first include a test to see if a dependency is satisfied, then what to run if it hasn’t been satisfied. It could be something as simple as installing Textmate on your mac or deploying a full Rails stack. If you're a sysadmin type, the screencast on the front page is definitely worth a watch.

Cucumber 0.7 was released on Sunday, which contains a new parser, alowing it to parse through feature files 50-100 times faster than previous releases. You’ll definitely want to read the upgrade instructions if you want to jump to this revision, because you may need to modify your stories or features to make them compatible.

On Wednesday David Balatero released monster_mash, which provides a DSL help you build client APIs and do RESTful web service calls. Whatʼs interesting about monster_mash over other libraries is that it wraps the Typhoeus library, which means when you call out to web services you can make a blocking or non-blocking call.

Thimblr from jphastings is a Sinatra port of Thimble, which mocks Tumblrʼs rendering engine so you can develop your themes locally in your favorite text editor instead of that tiny little text area in the Tumblr settings screen. Thimblr even supports importing your Tumblr content and storing in a local YAML file so you can see what your site will look like with your content.

RSpec has always had the ability to run a setup task before a series of tests, but test/unit never did. Rick Olson recently released Runningman, which adds this functionality to test/unit in a clean way.

Previous Episodes

ice_cube, by_star, monitoring the JVM with JRuby, resque-restriction, jquery-offline, GoogleVisualr, and Ruby on Rails Jargon for Beginners, as well as plenty of witty repartee on this linguist-sponsored episode of Ruby5.